Arts Thread

Fusheng Zhong
Jewelry + Metalsmithing MFA

Rhode Island School of Design

Graduates: 2026

Specialisms: Jewelry

My location: Beijing, China

fusheng-zhong ArtsThread Profile
Rhode Island School of Design

Fusheng Zhong

fusheng-zhong ArtsThread Profile

First Name: Fusheng

Last Name: Zhong

University / College: Rhode Island School of Design

Course / Program: Jewelry + Metalsmithing MFA

Graduates: 2026

Specialisms: Jewelry

My Location: Beijing, China

About

Fusheng Zhong is a jewelry artist and illustrator from China, holding an MFA in Jewelry + Metalsmithing from the Rhode Island School of Design. Their practice explores how historical narratives, cultural memory, and individual experience can be translated into intimate, material forms.Working across jewelry, sculpture, paper, metal, hair, and found cultural imagery, Zhong draws inspiration from Chinese classical poetry, historical documents, and literati aesthetics. Through meticulous handmaking and unconventional materials, they transform history from a distant, monumental structure into something fragile, bodily, and emotionally accessible. Their work considers jewelry not only as adornment, but also as a form of documentation—one that allows the weight of history to be carried with human warmth.

Within the Archive: Jewelry and the Poetics of Historical Trace

Within the Archive explores how jewelry can transform historical documents into intimate bodily experiences. Drawing from Chinese classical poetry, Buddhist ideas of time, and literati traditions, I use paper, human hair, metal, ink, and clay to translate cultural memory into wearable and sculptural forms. The project centers on Li Bai’s poem Bring the Wine, whose affirmation of the present resists the anxiety produced by historical narratives. Through scrolls, vessels, embroidered cicadas, and oversized jewelry, history becomes fragile, tactile, and warm. Rather than treating the archive as fixed evidence, I approach it as material that can be carried, altered, and reimagined.